Winona; or, The Foster
Sisters, only recently reprinted for the first time since
its serialized appearance in 1873, is one of Isabella Valancy
Crawford’s first publications. Editors Len Early and Michael A.
Peterman, in their extensive introduction to the 2007 edition,
detail the novel’s origins in a contest promoting Canadian national
identity. Winona won this competition asking for a
“quintessentially Canadian story” (52) to be “formed on Canadian
history, experience and incident” (25). The novel “appeared
serially in twelve installments from 11 January to 29 March 1873 in
The Favorite, which was, like its predecessor
The Hearthstone, a weekly ‘story paper’ ” (10), one of
many short-lived publications of its kind and time interested in
bolstering Canadian national spirit (23–24). Early and Peterman
explain that Crawford was writing in “an unsupportive Canadian
literary milieu” (15) and, after the story paper defaulted on its
cash prize for Winona, Crawford “direct[ed] her
fiction almost exclusively to an American market” (30).
Winona, then, presents an important opportunity to
consider the place of Canadian settlement and nation-building in
the work of this canonical Canadian writer. This paper examines
inheritance in Winona as it suggests a conception of
merited belonging in early Canada.

Winona falls into a genre typical of the story
paper context in which it first appeared—the Victorian sensation
novel. Along with an emphasis on popular appeal, the sensation
novel also presented a challenge to reigning cultural conceptions.
As Winona’s editors explain, the sensation novel was
involved in the debate about the “so-called ‘woman question’—the
controversy over women’s nature and place in society” (37). Lyn
Pykett, examining the sensation novel, women writers, and
representations of women in nineteenth-century society, writes that
sensationalist writing combined several “dominant female forms of
the early nineteenth century,” including “domestic realism” in such
a way as to challenge women’s “prescribed social and familial
roles” (6). For Early and Peterman, “With its climatic triple
wedding, Crawford’s novel certainly reinforces the most
conservative of ‘solutions’ for women in nineteenth-century Canada
and in the world of nineteenth-century fiction,” but Winona’s
“status as ‘Indian’ … permits her contravention of the normative
femininity represented in all the other women” (42). Yet,
ultimately, this potential challenge to dominant roles is
undermined in Winona. In this family, the wife is
settled into the domestic, the “Indian” is excluded as outsider,
Winona reinforces these conservative roles, and Winona
(the text as a whole) reinforces their prominence in its
narrative.

In this narrative featuring—as Ailsa Kay argues in “Sensation
and Civility: Protecting the Confederation Family in Isabella
Valancy Crawford’s Winona; Or, the Foster-Sisters”
(1)—a family that is itself a confederation representing various
Canadian identities, a significant aspect of Winona is
its anticipation of Crawford’s ongoing exploration of Canada as
nation. In particular, the editors note, “a passage on pioneering
(134–35) looks forward to the central ‘nation-building’ passages of
both ‘Malcolm’s Katie’ and Hugh and Ion” (34). While
Crawford continues to consider nation building in her later, most
well-known works, she had also been investigating the theme since
her earliest writings. Margot Dunn examines the “fairy stories”
which Crawford seems to have written in her late childhood or
teenage years (19), finding this work to “show the roots of her
optimism about the growing civilization of Canadian society” (27).
Dunn also finds in this early writing that “Crawford’s presentation
of the idea of the woman (or female principle) holding the world
together and the man (or male principle) venturing forth to other
worlds translates into a study of the Victorian family situation,
not very changed a century later” (29). This combined interest in
the family and the nation is important in considering
Winona’s family-as-nation as well as the demonstration
of a particular conception of belonging and entitlement that I find
in Crawford’s depiction of the early Canadian nation.

While Dunn notes Crawford’s optimism about Canadian nation
building, Early and Peterman point to the critical disagreement
surrounding Crawford’s later stance on settlement (13). In
Winona, this ambiguity is most evident in Winona’s
position in the story...

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